Sam Leith on what maketh today's man

From mutton-chopped Victorian dads to lad-mag lager louts, men have always been expected to conform to type. But today’s bloke is throwing off the shackles of stereotype to redefine masculinity. Why choose between breadwinner and breadmaker when you can be both, argues Sam Leith

As Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant sang: ‘In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man.’ It's a fair bet, from what I know of Led Zeppelin’s behaviour on tour, that the advice has changed somewhat between the days of Mr Plant’s youth and our own. What the young Robert Plant would have made of today’s dominant images of masculinity Lord alone knows.

The age when ‘men were men’ — schtupping groupies and wrestling mudsharks in their snakeskin trousers — now seems as long gone as the age of the mutton-chopped Victorian dad. Fathers are hands-on, the keeping of mistresses is uncool and the cracking of tit jokes is left to the girls. ‘Crumpet’ is something you make, not something you chase.

While acknowledging the many blind spots and pluralities in any discussion of masculinity, it is still possible to talk about prevailing winds in the culture at large — on television and in the movies, in novels and in journalism. Men are no longer primarily validated by their degree of individual autonomy (from family in particular), power and status.

Look at the TV we watch. Breaking Bad’s Walter White is a family man and a geek, and his tragedy is exactly that the further he moves away from that — into an obsession with status, money and power — the worse things get for him. Mad Men’s Don Draper is the portrait of a classic alpha male, framed as a walking nervous breakdown.

All those male-dominated panel games such as Mock the Week, Never Mind the Buzzcocks and 8 Out of 10 Cats are looking very Noughties, too, while Men Behaving Badly is an actual museum piece. Sitcoms such as The IT Crowd and the quirky, unapologetically intellectual quizzes QI and Only Connect (whose title is an EM Forster quote, for Pete’s sake) are much more the speed. The sort of hairy bikers we see on TV are baking cupcakes rather than dealing drugs and beating up hippies.

Another finger to the wind might be the hiring of Tony Parsons as a columnist on The Sun. Parsons’ particular territory as a novelist is a bruised and compromised masculinity. His heroes are working-class men getting in touch with their feminine sides. The generation of so-called ‘lad lit’ with which his work is associated is not, in fact, all that laddish: look at Nick Hornby and Tim Lott. Big jessies the pair of them. Across the Atlantic the troubled machismo of the Norman Mailer/Philip Roth/John Updike generation in American letters has given way to the uxorious, bespectacled likes of Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jeffrey Eugenides and co.

Geeks, rather than goombahs, are the new role models. Brian Cox is a pin-up. Julian Assange won friends for his nerdery and lost them for his apparently unreconstructed sexual politics. Large in the culture are people such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Richard Ayoade and Dan Stevens (nice boy: I met him once and we talked mostly about the poetry of Hart Crane).

Meanwhile, we can look across the aisle — and, to an extent, across the narrowing class divide — at the old-style lad culture and see it dying. It is fighting in certain foxholes: the No More Page 3 campaign, for instance, is meeting firm resistance. Social media bubbles with aggressive/defensive anti-female trolling, and if you search for #lad or #banter you can still find plenty to wince at. But campaigns such as the Everyday Sexism project are even making headway in modernising Freshers’ Week at universities. When Robin Thicke sang ‘Blurred Lines’ he wasn’t celebrated as a top lad: he was castigated as a rape apologist.

This is the culmination of a long process. Even during the early Noughties — when Loaded was in its pomp, and diffusion-line products such as Zoo and Nuts were staggering beerily aboard the bandwagon — there was something semi-apologetic about laddishness. It was hedged around with a clumsy sort of irony. It was, in retrospect, a rearguard action. Now its proponents are coming forward to offer their mea culpas. Former Loaded editor Martin Daubney, for instance, recently made a documentary about the harmful effects of pornography (Private Eye unkindly points out that he’s married to the picture editor for Page 3).

Whether or not you take the cynical view of these repenting sinners, they mark a decisive shift. Either the repentance is genuine (a shift in the culture has changed the minds of the former lads-in-chief) or it’s opportunistic (a shift in the culture has created a market for anti-lad-maggery). Either way, lad mags are dying. Newsagents are putting them on the top shelf along with that other bizarre heritage industry, dead-tree porn.

My own family experience seemed to span this divide. My dad spent years as a househusband while my mother — then pursuing a successful career in TV and journalism — went out breadwinning. So the image of a man in a pinny is imprinted on my psyche with no less firmness than a mother duck’s on its hatchling.

In the late 1980s my dad was baking bread and cooking pasta, changing nappies and doing the school run. I admire him for that as much as I admire any man living — and I admire him especially because at the time there was a distinct lack of kudos attached to what he was doing.

I remember one of my father’s friends, hearing that Dad had been present at the birth of his children, wincing and saying: ‘Bit more of a conception man, myself.’ To be a househusband — or ‘houseworm’, as my father styled himself — was to be a bit of a jessie: the butt of jokes among male friends and regarded with suspicion by mums at the school gates.

He went on to write a very funny book about his experiences, called Ironing John. It tells you something of the times that his title puns on a book then in vogue: Robert Bly’s Iron John, a ghastly philosophy-cum-self-help book about how men had to go back to being primal men, having group hugs in woodland contexts, chopping down trees, painting their hairy parts with woad and so forth. Now-forgotten books by Neil Lyndon (No More Sex War: The Failures of Feminism, anyone?) and David Thomas (Not Guilty: The Case in Defense of Men, ditto) arguing that feminism had gone too far were then current, too.

These days I’m in something approximating Dad’s position. My wife and I, both freelance, swap childcare as circumstances warrant. When she gets a job, I will be up to my ears in fish fingers, rice cakes and obscurely sticky bits of Duplo for two or three months at a time. But my word, how the landscape has changed! You now get credit — Alice claims crossly that as a man you actually get double credit — for looking after your children yourself.

That double-credit thing will probably pass: what was once derided is now admired, and what is now admired will in short order be normalised. That’s a liberation. Those very constricting and defensive paradigms of masculinity did none of us — even the very alpha — any favours. Who hasn’t had that deep inner feeling of despair when, on a stag night, you observe yourself behaving boorishly for no better reason than boorishness is what seems to be expected of you?

Modern masculinity means caring for your family. It means cooking, and having a pack of wet wipes handy, and knowing to separate lights and darks before you do a wash. It means hanging out in the park with the other mums. It means measuring your worth by the contentment of your children rather than by the size of your pay packet. It means being intellectually curious and even nerdy, rather than pretending that pints and footie are at the core of your being even if you’d secretly rather be playing a game of Scrabble.

It means being able to laugh at yourself, too. If the modern man is mocked — an acquaintance complains that every time he has a domestic catastrophe his daughter says, ‘Silly Daddy Pig!’ — at least he is also mocking himself. And that’s a wonderful state, if you ask me, for modern man to be in.